In a new monograph, <i>Fragonard: Painting Out of Time</i>, Satish Padiyar, tries to get beneath the skin of this elusive painter who apparently preferred artistic freedom to material reward. His task is complicated by a dearth of biographical information. In an age of voluminous correspondence, Fragonard left no letters and no diaries. Even the accounts of his peers are sketchy and possibly misleading . . . We don’t know what he was thinking when he painted erotic masterpieces such as <i>The Swing</i> (1767) or <i>The Bolt</i> (c.1778), but it’s fascinating to place these works within the cultural context of France in the last years of the <i>ancien régime</i> . . . While sticking closely to the available documentation Padiyar has allowed himself the interpretative freedom to divide his study into three sections: secrets, surprise and dreams. This may sound like a licence for fantasy but nothing in the book is wildly implausible.

John McDonald, Sydney Morning Herald

Fragonard spent much of his life as a fashionable painter of genre decorations for members of the French aristocracy, but when these patrons began losing their heads in 1789, Fragonard lost his commissions. Never quite able to make the transition over to a more democratic kind of painting, Fragonard put his brushes down for the last time sometime in the early 1790s. Satish Padiyar takes this moment as the starting point of his new investigation into Fragonard’s life and work, which focuses especially on the artist’s innovations in the field of drawing.

The New Criterion

Padiyar argues that the key to the mysteries of Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s life and work lies in the artist’s relationship to time. According to Padiyar, Fragonard (1732–1806) was "out of time" – a belated master of a playful rococo idiom of surprise and instability. Fragonard stopped painting decades before his death, but he maintained a drawing practice that prolonged what Padiyar argues was the artist's lifelong interest in secrets and reverie. Organized into three conceptual chapters – "Secrets," "Surprise," "Dreams" – Padiyar’s book weaves in and out of Fragonard’s career, always tightly focused on the artist’s motivations and personality. In making his argument the author privileges formal analysis, supported by biographical evidence and strategic reference to eighteenth-century art theory and philosophy. Written in stylish, sophisticated prose, the study offers interpretations both of Fragonard’s most famous works and of less-known paintings and drawings. A valuable addition to the literature on eighteenth-century French art and culture. Recommended.

Choice

Padiyar manages to weave a cohesive narrative despite the variety of sources, and his thematic treatment of these works results in a very lucid read . . . any contextual knowledge that Padiyar requires of his readers is often provided; <i>Fragonard</i> is as much an exploration of the artist as it is a brief intellectual history of his milieu, which is particularly useful given Padiyar’s ongoing focus on time itself. Given the limitations of the available material, Padiyar succeeds in offering an original analysis that, while not purporting to solve all the problems that exist around Fragonard, allow us to access some modicum of the artists’ hitherto shadowy inner world.

French History

Padiyar explores artist Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s life, work, and generally secretive existence in this beautiful book complete with history, personal thoughts and 114 illustrations . . . The book is a thorough exploration, painting a picture of how he came to be and how his legacy lives on in contemporary culture. A book worth buying very much for the imagery, which is splashed onto pages with intense colours.

The Connexion magazine

A brilliant new account of Fragonard’s art that reveals some of its most intriguing secrets.

Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts, Harvard University and author of The Painter's Touch: Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard (2018)

Deeply erudite . . . [Padiyar] illuminates the whole field of later eighteenth-century art.

Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, New York University

A fresh approach to this quintessential French eighteenth-century artist, Satish Padiyar’s book is also an innovative take on the genre of the monograph as it integrates biography and works in a novel and intelligent fashion. Making the most of the sparseness of information about Fragonard’s life, this beautifully written study weaves its narrative with discussions of the works along three themes: secrets, surprise, dreams. Surprising about the book itself is how the artist emerges as an entity from it, palpable in a way he has never been before.

Mechthild Fend, Professor of History of Art, University College London